Thursday, February 27, 2014

Overcoming distractions during prayer

By Carlos X.

St. Peter in Tears by Murillo (Wikimedia Commons).

"That labor of the intellect which we call meditation," wrote the
Venerable Fr. Luis De La Puente (1554-1624), “is among the most difficult things about mental prayer.” We all know the reasons: “It is easy to have several things in mind at
once, and to dash from one thing to another without order or concert, but it is
very difficult to think about a single thing with concentration, with fixed
memory and understanding of God, without diverting to or spilling over to other
things; even the great Saints have this trouble sometimes, and they complain
about it.”

Fr. La Puente was the subject of Archbishop
Óscar A. Romero’s thesis for his doctorate studies in theology. Romero never obtained the degree but he put Fr. La Puente’s methods into
practice. Fr. La Puente spurred the
young Romero to strive to perfect his devotion.
“In recent days the Lord has
inspired in me a great desire for holiness, after I had read some of Father La
Puente,” Romero wrote in his diary in February 1943."I have
been thinking of how far a soul can ascend if it lets itself be possessed
entirely by God." But, like the
saints that Fr. La Puente tells us had trouble concentrating during prayer,
Archbishop Romero sometimes felt distracted.